Strategies for building link karma on Reddit

Method 1
The first method I?m going to cover is one that establishes a foundation for all the methods I cover in the post. With that said, I?m starting with you Redditors who have been around for a while and have a number of successful posts. Basically, all you do is go back to your earliest posts on Reddit (mine go back a little over 2 years now) and work your way forward reusing/repurposing your content along the way. Deceptively simple, right?

Now, while I know many Redditors out there are rolling their eyes at the thought of reposts, here are a few points to consider:

a) There?s a good chance that TONS of people are on Reddit now who weren?t before when you posted what you did a year or two (or longer) ago. I?ve had plenty of reposts that garnered ~1000 up-votes without a single person complaining about them being reposts.

b) You have numerous options for not just reusing content, but repurposing it as well. Heck, many Redditors repurpose content all the time by doing cross-posts (x-posts) between subreddits, so why not do the same with something you posted a long time ago? Maybe you posted something to /r/pics that you think would perform better now in /r/funny. Or, maybe you change the title but repost in the same subreddit. Or, maybe you don?t change a single thing!

c) Ultimately, the people decide what they do and do not like. If 200 people complain about a repost via comments but you pull in even so much as 20 up-votes, then the number of people who felt moved enough to up-vote outweighed the complainers and you ended up with what you set out to build: link karma.

Now, the next part of this method is to delete your older posts once you?ve created new ones out of the older content. This isn?t necessary at all, but I prefer to since I don?t want duplicates showing up in my user profile. At the moment, the karma you gain or lose is independent of the posts you gain or lose it from. In other words, deleting a post won?t strip you of the karma you built with it!

Method 2
Now it?s time for the really fun stuff. This method will have you being part Google hacker ?wow, you must not have a life.? Basically, you?re going to seek out Redditors who have been on Reddit for at least a year, first. Then, you?re going to go back through their old posts and do what you did in the method above: reuse/repurpose successful content. So, how do you find such people? With the following extremely awesome Google query I?ve crafted (click it to see it in Google):

That query says the following to Google: ?Google, I want to see Reddit users who have been on the site for a year or more and all I want to see is their primary user page. Additionally, I want you to highlight ?link karma? for me in the description snip-it you provide so I can quickly see just how much link karma any given user has without having to click through to their profile.?

With that query in Google, I?ve made it easy for you to find Reddit users like this who have over 47,000 link karma, but there?s a hitch: Good luck going page-by-page through this particular user?s history using Reddit?s in-built ?prev/next? functionality (seriously, can we get some pagination going, Reddit?). As such, a nice little workaround is to view that user?s top-rated content for all time and start your search from there. Luckily, Reddit makes this extremely easy for us. Have a look at the screen shot below:

As you can see, Reddit allows us a ?sort by? function, whereby we can sort content in a number of ways. Here, our preference is to sort by ?top? and make sure the ?links from? section is set to ?all time.? Once you do that, that user?s posts will all be sorted by number of total up-votes, which you can see on the left. Lastly, beneath the post title, you can see how long ago the post was submitted and to which subreddit it was posted to. Perfect. That?s everything you need to go about business as usual. To note, you can sort YOUR user page like this as well, so maybe you prefer doing this instead of manually going all the way back through your posts as explained in the first method.

Now, if you, as a Redditor, do not want YOUR user profile to show up in a Google search like this, then all you have to do is head on over to your preferences and check the following box within your privacy options:

Lastly, since Google only shows 55 pages of results, you can work on refining the query I posted above. For example, you could start by searching for the specific amount of time a Redditor has been on the site and start getting more specific from there:

With that said, head on over to the next page where I continue the link karma-building fun and ultimately conclude the post with some general tips and a personal philosophy of how I feel about all of the methods I?ve discussed (hint: I?m in favor of recirculating great content).

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